A Massive Archiving Effort at National Parks (with Jenny McBurney and Lynda Kellam)

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Speaker 3 this week we are joined by linda kellum and jenny mcmurney Linda Kellum leads the research data and digital scholarship team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is a founding organizer of the data rescue project which we're going to get into in this episode and Jenny is the government publications librarian and regional depository coordinator, nailed it, at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Speaker 3 Thank you both for being here. I'm so excited to talk about this project.
We cover archiving, preservation, and all that good stuff quite a bit 404.

Speaker 3 So very excited to talk to some of the folks who do it every day.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so Jenny, do you want to say hi to people who can recognize your voice? I just realized we're having a two-person interview podcast is a little different.

Speaker 2 Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 What should I say?

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm Jenny.

Speaker 3 And Linda?

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm Linda. Awesome.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so both Jenny and Linda have been volunteering to help lead this independent project called Save Our Signs.

Speaker 3 It's something that I wrote about a couple months ago, and then again last week when they launched the result of the archiving.

Speaker 3 And Save Our Signs is this really big, impressive effort to archive national park signs and monument placards around the country?

Speaker 3 It's crowdsourced, it's community collaboration, it was co-founded by librarians, public historians, data experts, and all of this was done

Speaker 3 in partnership with the librarians at their respective universities, but also with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research and Culture, which are both doing really important work, especially following the Trump administration and just in the few

Speaker 3 nine months that we've had so far, shockingly, as so much information, public information and data and

Speaker 3 just knowledge on the internet and IRL has gone down

Speaker 3 as a result of some of the orders that we're going to talk about today. So we'll get into that in a second.

Speaker 3 But tell us a little bit about yourselves before we dig into this project. How did you get into library sciences and data preservation?

Speaker 3 Linda, do you want to go first?

Speaker 4 Sure. I've been a data librarian since 2007.
So I've been around for a while. And I actually started in a position similar to Jenny's where I was

Speaker 4 not a regional coordinator, but I was part of the government information depository system as a librarian.

Speaker 4 I got into

Speaker 4 data librarianship because I was a political science major. So I'd been working

Speaker 4 in a PhD program for political science. I'd been working with data for a while, both qualitative and quantitative,

Speaker 4 and decided I didn't really like political science much anymore.

Speaker 4 So I started looking around for career paths, and data librarianship seemed like a good use of my skills, especially at that time because it was so early in that field.

Speaker 4 There weren't a lot of people who had skills with data

Speaker 4 in librarianship at the time. So

Speaker 4 I thought it was a good fit. Decided to do it.
And here we are.

Speaker 3 Relevant to where we're at today, for sure. I think everyone needs to take a political science course at this point.

Speaker 3 Very cool. Thank you for that.
Jenny, how about you?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a slightly similar origin story in that I also did PolySci as an undergrad degree.

Speaker 2 And while I was in my undergrad, my advisor was a faculty member and a librarian at the same time. And so I basically wanted to be her when I grew up.

Speaker 2 And so went to library school, took the GovDocs class,

Speaker 2 bounced around in a couple of different liaison areas. Lately, I've ended up as the government publications librarian, and

Speaker 2 it lends itself very well to looking at data and just like open resources and information that everyone in the public should be able to access.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So all of this just fits really well into all of my interests.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
I feel like everyone or so many people, especially in academia, have that moment of like, I want to be that person.

Speaker 3 What are the steps

Speaker 3 that I take

Speaker 3 to be

Speaker 3 my mentor or someone that I look up to?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so

Speaker 3 you were both positioned pretty well for 2025

Speaker 3 after that experience and building

Speaker 3 that knowledge base. And in March,

Speaker 3 we saw Trump sign this executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Good start.
Amazing title.

Speaker 3 What a banger.

Speaker 3 And in that order, it demanded that public officials make sure that things like monument placards and signs

Speaker 3 and things that we take for granted when you show up to like DC, for example, and you walk up to like the MLK Memorial and you say, here's a sign that someone wrote and decided to put there, or even like a battlefield or something like that.

Speaker 3 And it said that anything under the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction, basically, which is a lot of stuff,

Speaker 3 would never attempt to address anything negative about American history and past or present. And instead, they should only ever acknowledge how beautiful and pretty America looks.

Speaker 3 I think the wording in the EO was

Speaker 3 beauty and grandeur,

Speaker 3 which is great, love, beauty, and grandeur, but

Speaker 3 there's a lot of American history that is not pretty to look at, and that is important to know.

Speaker 3 So, this executive order demanded that those signs come down

Speaker 3 that said anything negative about America by September 17th, and this was in March.

Speaker 3 So, walk me through

Speaker 3 where you were

Speaker 3 when you heard about this order and what was like, because you're coming from a very different mindset than a lot of people. A lot of people were like, wow, fuck, that's crazy.

Speaker 3 You were, you had a different reaction. So I would love to hear just like where you were, what you were doing at the time and what your initial like first reaction was to hearing this.

Speaker 4 I can say that, so at that time I was work in the thick of the data rescue project work.

Speaker 4 So the first reaction in March was,

Speaker 4 what in the world are they talking about? This is, you know, just sheer frustration.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 in March, it was really hard to kind of concentrate on what they were, what the implications would be, I think. And there was other things that we had to focus on.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 for me,

Speaker 4 it's dismay and frustration that they would, and

Speaker 4 I don't think these people, the people who wrote that, I don't think they go to national parks. They don't think they understand what is at national parks.

Speaker 4 That this isn't, national parks aren't just

Speaker 4 natural areas, that they are, they engage with our history of America. And so it was,

Speaker 4 it was also a bit of,

Speaker 4 in addition to frustration, dismay, like disbelief in that they understand even what a national park is. So

Speaker 3 yeah, it's pretty clear from like

Speaker 3 from the wording that they don't understand.

Speaker 3 So I totally, and I hadn't even thought of that, that they probably don't even get it.

Speaker 3 That it's not just a pretty place to look at

Speaker 3 where you might see a bear or something. It's actually like meant to be educational.

Speaker 4 It's a lot of different kinds of parts of there.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Which I didn't even fully grasp until I started reporting on this.

Speaker 3 Jenny, what was your first like and gut reaction to that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 At that point, I think it had been

Speaker 2 over 100 executive orders had come out since the beginning of the

Speaker 2 whole situation. And

Speaker 2 I remember reading the title of it and being like, whatever, I can't deal with this and just moving on with my life and did not pay attention until the secretarial order came out in May, May 20th.

Speaker 2 And so when the Secretary

Speaker 2 of the Interior

Speaker 2 made a

Speaker 2 order about um what the specifics of the implementation of what this executive order would be that's when i started paying attention it was like oh this is actually gonna do something bad so yeah

Speaker 3 yeah and um and that order was i mean i um i saw that and

Speaker 3 um totally agree that at that point you're like okay people who are in charge of implementing this are taking it seriously and they're actually going to do it you know they're falling in line um So that was that was part of also the

Speaker 3 what

Speaker 3 Secretary Doug Bergam wrote in that order was: this is how we're going to do it. And how they were going to do it was partially they were going to start putting QR codes up next to

Speaker 3 park signs. Right.
Am I remembering that correctly?

Speaker 4 Well, there, and there's a sign that they required the parks to put up that had the QR code where you could report signage that was disparaging.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I saw one of those for the first time ever, a month ago, I think,

Speaker 3 at

Speaker 3 the big prison that's on Governor's Island in New York, which has an incredibly dark history.

Speaker 3 And you have this sign here that's like,

Speaker 3 if you don't like what you're reading, snitch.

Speaker 3 It's like, no, the point is to learn about it and to know what happened here.

Speaker 3 It's a prison. It exists and it's preserved to remember that history.
So,

Speaker 3 okay, so that's a a really good point. That, um, you know, the interior secretary was like, Okay, we're gonna actually do this, we're gonna

Speaker 3 enforce this ridiculous

Speaker 3 EO about restoring truth and sanity.

Speaker 3 Scary enough. Um, and then what was kind of the next step? Like, did you immediately go into like

Speaker 3 librarian mode and start thinking we have to do something, or what was the next impulse you had?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 yeah,

Speaker 4 independently, that was the interesting part.

Speaker 4 So Data Rescue Project started talking about ways that we could try and capture, do a crowdsource effort to get people taking pictures and submitting them. And we went through several iterations.

Speaker 4 We thought maybe just submitting them to Blue Sky would be the easiest because we have a Blue Sky account.

Speaker 4 And then we tried to set up

Speaker 4 another approach that did not, we actually got, ended up locked out of that approach for some reason. I forget why.

Speaker 4 It was just, it didn't work out.

Speaker 4 And I think that that's when we put out a call for assistance because we were just so frustrated trying to figure out what the mechanism would be for doing this.

Speaker 4 But my idea, or not my idea, but my goal for myself was that I wanted to turn the tactic on the administration. So if they were going to use QR codes to have people report

Speaker 4 these pictures, I wanted to have people report what they loved about the pictures, you know, to kind of flip the script a little bit. um

Speaker 4 uh and that

Speaker 4 once we uh put out a call on matter most i think that's when jenny um saw that and and was like oh we're already we're already doing this so so cool that you were having like the same brainwave at the same time um so then jenny what were you working on over at uh in minnesota yeah so

Speaker 2 pretty much the same conversations that we were having like okay we got to do something about this what are we going to do what are the different ways that we could what are the different tools that we could use?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 for me, the specific turning point happened at

Speaker 5 a

Speaker 2 AI conference.

Speaker 3 I will admit,

Speaker 2 I'm not the biggest fan of AI, but I was presenting at a panel there.

Speaker 2 And one of my co-panelists was Kirsten Delagard, who is the director of the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota.

Speaker 2 And I was like, Kirsten, I'm really bummed out about the national parks. And she was like, yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 And I was like, you know, Mapping Prejudice does all this really cool crowdsourcing, community-based work. Could we do that for national park signs? And she was like, yes, let's do this.

Speaker 2 So we started trying different things, but we didn't really know how to like get things moving.

Speaker 2 And so that's when I was at that conference, I was at a different conference, the ALA conference in Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 And I saw Linda's post in the Mattermost where we kind of chat about data rescue things.

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to work. We found people who can help make this happen.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so we had kind of settled on the idea of using a Qualtrics survey

Speaker 2 because, you know, working out of a university, we have access to these really powerful tools. Qualtrics is really great and we chose it because

Speaker 2 folks can upload materials without like photos without having to log in with an email account.

Speaker 2 And we knew from having various conversations with people who work in the parks that anonymity was going to be a really important aspect of people wanting to participate in this project.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 we realized that this was going to be the best option from our end where we could collect the photos, but also information about the photos and keep that information really organized and also not create a barrier of people having to like say who they were, that they could just take their photo and submit it to the online form.

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Speaker 3 Yeah. And so if you're,

Speaker 3 if I'm at a park and I see a sign that I want to preserve, and you were taking all signs, right?

Speaker 3 Like it wasn't just like, if you think this sign might be at risk, it was like, I saw signs for like Astique Island. It was like, oh, that's nice.
Like,

Speaker 3 probably fine, but like, you know,

Speaker 3 keep it for sure.

Speaker 3 But people, if you get to a sign and you open the Qualtrics link, right? And then you snap a photo and put in, like, what else is in the form that you were taking from people?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So they upload the photo. They say, yes, I consent to put this into the project and put it into the public domain so that the photo can be reused.

Speaker 2 They can also enter the title of the sign if they have time, if they feel inclined,

Speaker 2 or any additional information about it, like it's located at this particular section of the park or it's located in this particular building in the park.

Speaker 2 And then they can also add the date and

Speaker 3 submit it.

Speaker 2 And so we tried to make it as short of a survey as possible to make it easier for people.

Speaker 2 And we also got a lot of help from folks through the Data Rescue Project Network Network of finding people who were really good at building accessible, good Qualtrics surveys specifically.

Speaker 2 And so getting help on that was really important too, to make sure that it was a

Speaker 2 usable tool.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. You want as little friction as possible.
Right.

Speaker 3 Do it. Do it as quickly as possible and get on your way.

Speaker 3 I think Linda mentioned something about this just now also, but like the decision to make it a crowdsourced effort, you could have just said, we have a network of people who who have experience archiving and will like take the high quality photo and get the information we want.

Speaker 3 You could have just said, go out to your parks

Speaker 3 and do this. Why did you decide to leave it up to the public to bring in all this data?

Speaker 4 We didn't have that reach. I mean, we knew that there was no way we could have the reach.

Speaker 4 And it was by the time we had started to get everything together, it was so close to July 4th that we wanted to capitalize on that, on the fact that people would be going out to parks

Speaker 4 we had had a lot of luck with crowdsourcing the data rescue efforts and so it didn't seem that this seemed like an easier lift for a lot of people who may be wanting to do something but weren't really feeling like they could do a data rescue because that does require some technical

Speaker 4 skill So this was something that anybody could do. You can go take a picture and you can submit it onto a form.
It's really not that hard.

Speaker 4 And so I think that's that was one, it was just a matter of feasibility to be able to cover all of 300 parks or as many of those as possible. And then two,

Speaker 4 getting people

Speaker 4 the word out there about what was happening and how important national parks are and why we should care about this issue. I think that those are the

Speaker 4 two things that I see as the most important for that crowdsource element.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 a lot of the same thoughts and especially like the point that you made earlier about

Speaker 2 that, you know, this is what the administration was asking for for the public to weigh in. Okay, well, then we're going to weigh in and we're going to show what we think is important.

Speaker 2 We, the people of America, are going to say that we think this is important and contribute to this collection of photos.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 I, and I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself to people who listen to the podcast because I think I discussed the project before and they probably heard me say this before. But

Speaker 3 I think it's such an interesting exercise just in

Speaker 3 that muscle for people to start looking and paying attention to things, to not just understanding what an executive order like this can do.

Speaker 3 Because signs did start

Speaker 3 going down even before, I think, September. There were a couple of signs that were, I'm blanking on.
Do you guys remember where the John Mirrors?

Speaker 4 The John Mirrors. The Mirror Woods.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it was like, it was starting to happen and it probably is still happening.

Speaker 3 And I, like I said, I learned something about national parks. Like, I didn't realize how huge the system was.
And I'm a national parks fan.

Speaker 3 And I think if you're not, if you're not someone who's like super engaged on a lot of political issues, maybe you can like appreciate that. the parks are this other kind of like very

Speaker 3 um sacred thing that everyone is meant to enjoy.

Speaker 3 It seems like the least political thing in the world to go out and enjoy your local park.

Speaker 3 So I think like making people kind of flex that muscle a little bit is interesting. And

Speaker 3 in a way that is very positive. Like you said,

Speaker 3 it's highlighting what we love about having access to this information, this education.

Speaker 3 Not just like

Speaker 3 attempting to scramble to get it saved, but like really appreciating it, which I think was

Speaker 3 not the goal, probably, but like definitely cool.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, and and I will say that I think the

Speaker 4 some people assume that these these uh new signs were just created in 2020 or in response to 2020 events in 2020. And

Speaker 4 if you look at Philadelphia's signs, a lot of those were years and decades in the making and the acknowledgement of the history of slavery in Independence Park is a huge part of the conversation that's been going on in Philadelphia about this.

Speaker 4 So it's not, you know, recognizing not just that this is important for

Speaker 4 you as a person, but also for the wider community and the efforts that's gone into recognize the history of slavery or the history of civil rights in the country,

Speaker 4 I think has been a very important part of this and something that I don't think a lot of people

Speaker 4 understand who aren't

Speaker 4 engaged in it every day.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the signage in parks is one of those things that like you don't notice or think about until you're really looking and meant, you're really there reading and being thoughtful about what you're consuming.

Speaker 3 For a lot of people, I think you're there just to like.

Speaker 3 see, I don't know. It's like the Statue of Liberty National Monument is part of the park system.

Speaker 3 And there were so many, there were like 440 signs from

Speaker 3 that, just that

Speaker 3 monument, which I thought was really interesting. I don't know if it could not have been the only one person.

Speaker 4 Oh, well, so we did an event.

Speaker 3 We did it. Okay,

Speaker 3 that explains that. Okay.
So you guys had an event there to promote?

Speaker 4 Yeah, we had two volunteers from our two of our steering committee members who live in New York took two different groups, one to Ellis Island. Lena Bowman took took them to Ellis Island.

Speaker 4 And I forget where the other group went, but

Speaker 4 Ellis, I think most of the people went to Ellis Island.

Speaker 4 And then that's why

Speaker 4 Independence Park is the second most submissions because it's been a big deal here and a lot of coverage in Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 Yeah, okay. That explains that.
I was like, God, this one guy at Ellis Island really racking it up, trying to get high score.

Speaker 4 It was a cool event. It was cool to be able to take people there.
And like we paid for the ferry to ride, Dig to Rescue Project paid for the ferry ride for the people who decided to come.

Speaker 4 But I think that's the thing. Somebody said to this to me early on, it's not just about the rescues.
It's about the community we build through the rescues.

Speaker 4 And I think that's something to keep in mind.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 You kind of touched on that, Sam. You said, like, I don't know if it was the goal.
I think it kind of was the goal.

Speaker 2 Like, there's two goals here there's there's the preservation and there's the getting people involved getting people to think about history talk to each other all of that

Speaker 3 yeah for sure

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Speaker 3 Yeah, and just going through the signs that were

Speaker 3 captured is,

Speaker 3 it's so interesting because, I mean, I was just clicking signs like at random to write about this and El Silen, obviously.

Speaker 3 So many of the signage is very, it's not like

Speaker 3 it doesn't have a political agenda. It's just saying exactly what was happening.
And what was happening was people were fleeing war and oppression and genocide. And that's very relevant to today.

Speaker 3 And, you know, sites like the Frederick Douglass historical site in DC

Speaker 3 has

Speaker 3 the,

Speaker 3 I think they probably have the full, I just saw a couple of the signs quoting, but the full What to the Slave is the the Fourth of July address.

Speaker 3 And that's just, it's a beautiful piece of work that is so relevant to today.

Speaker 3 And it's just,

Speaker 3 I like, if

Speaker 3 the administration was going to send out people to take down these signs, that would be just, I'm just imagining like ripping them all down.

Speaker 3 It would, you would have to take all of them down because how would you ever,

Speaker 3 I don't know, it's like all of them were like subversive in their own way while being just completely straight, no politics about it.

Speaker 3 Just this is what was happening at the time and what people were thinking about and dealing with.

Speaker 3 So I thought it was really incredible to go through the archive, but we'll talk about the archive in a second. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Speaker 3 Were you rushed? Was this like a very like, we need to get on this like immediately? Because I know a lot of archive projects, especially in the digital world, are like, this is going down tomorrow.

Speaker 3 get a terabyte ready. Like, let's go.

Speaker 3 What was kind of the mood? Was it very urgent for you to get this launched?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, we kind of talked about trying to make, capitalize on that 4th of July weekend. And like, that was the initial deadline of let's get this going.

Speaker 2 Let's get everything set up and ready to release. I think we officially launched on July 3rd.

Speaker 2 And yeah, I mean, all along there's a sense of urgency because we don't.

Speaker 2 know exactly what's at risk and we don't know exactly when it's at risk.

Speaker 2 Like you mentioned, Sam, like there have been some signs that came down before and after the September 17th, kind of initial deadline. And then

Speaker 2 there's no

Speaker 2 real understanding,

Speaker 2 at least I don't understand, exactly when things are going to be done.

Speaker 2 So we don't know.

Speaker 2 Have they stopped? Have they finished taking down signs? Or is this going to continue? And we kind of have to keep our eyes open to know when it's happening.

Speaker 2 So all along, there's a bit of a sense of urgency to

Speaker 2 try to collect as much as possible before it can be removed or changed.

Speaker 4 And there's some sites that we still can't get to. I mean, that are either closed.

Speaker 4 There's one site in particular I would love, and in Pennsylvania, I'd love to go to, but it's on an active military base.

Speaker 4 And it's a former

Speaker 4 Native American school. So it's definitely one of those that would be fit within

Speaker 4 kind of the main things that we're looking for.

Speaker 2 And that's why we are continuing to accept photos. And so if people are still going out to parks, take pictures of everything that you see.

Speaker 2 And like we've been saying all along, like we don't know what is at risk.

Speaker 2 We don't have a shared definition of what negative means or what disparaging means.

Speaker 2 And so we want pictures of everything and we still need pictures from a lot of places. And so we're still collecting photos.

Speaker 4 I'll give you a fun example that's not, it's not in civil rights history. It's not within that angle, but I think it's an interesting one.

Speaker 4 The Guilford Courthouse, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse

Speaker 4 is a site in North Carolina that

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 we, the revolutionary forces lost quite a bit. I mean, they lost many men.

Speaker 4 It was abjectly a loss, but

Speaker 4 they damaged the British forces so much that it changed the course of revolutionary history.

Speaker 4 And that site tells that story, but one of the questions I had when I went to it was: Would this be seen as disparaging? I mean, this is

Speaker 4 a negative view of the Revolutionary Army because it talks about the fact that the North Carolinians just kind of high-tailed it and ran away from the battle and other kinds of tales, you know, of

Speaker 4 mutiny, in a sense, but um but it's but it's it was a critical part of the revolutionary history um so the way the orders are written is are so um vague uh that even something that that's you would normally see as a pot like a

Speaker 4 and a part of military history could be interpreted as disparaging of

Speaker 4 um

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 It's one of those examples where it's, you know, we know what certain, we know what the likely candidates for removal and certainly those are the ones that we targeted but the way you can read this could be so much broader

Speaker 3 right then

Speaker 3 yeah and i'm sure that's by design um yeah i'm sure that's um that's part of the playbook here um the white house is part of the national park system

Speaker 3 currently being taken apart.

Speaker 3 Maybe we need to get somebody out there to take some pictures.

Speaker 3 Yeah, God, I have to laugh or laugh or we will cry.

Speaker 3 So you launched. Was it immediately just like everybody was flooding submissions? Did they trickle in? Like, what was the

Speaker 3 reaction after you launched?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, shout out to you at 404 Media for getting the first media mention out there.

Speaker 2 That's really how we got the word out, right? Like we

Speaker 2 shared on the data rescue project's Blue Sky and shared on lots of different listservs. And

Speaker 2 once we started hearing from reporters, then

Speaker 2 that was the chance to really get the story out into the people's hands. And

Speaker 2 I think that it only took a few weeks before suddenly the submissions were just. spiking like off the charts.

Speaker 2 Like I thought I was going to be able to see the photos come in and like look at each one as they came in. And that worked for like a week.
And then,

Speaker 2 and then it was too much, and it was very overwhelming. And we're like, okay, it's just going to happen, and we'll figure it out later.

Speaker 3 It's a good problem to have. It is.

Speaker 3 Was it a huge project to then sort that data to make it something that you could show

Speaker 3 the public and put into the domain? Yes. Tell me about that process.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So

Speaker 2 we kind of went with the original deadline of september 17th because we needed a cutoff point and so we said everything that anybody submitted before that date we at the very least we would get all of that out there by october 13th which was the date that we had picked um to tell people that yes we are in fact going to share this um the photographs that you take and make it part of a publicly accessible collection and um

Speaker 2 So we could do a little bit of work before then to prep scripts and things that were going to help organize all the photos and get them all into the right places.

Speaker 2 But there's only so much you can do before you wait till the cutoff date and then say, okay, here we go.

Speaker 2 And then we turned on all the scripts and things broke and then we kept working on it and had about a week to get everything organized. And then

Speaker 2 when that was ready, then we had a giant spreadsheet with... I think it was around 10,400 photos

Speaker 2 that had been submitted through September 24th. We're like, okay, that'll be the real cutoff date.
Give ourselves a little bit of wiggle room there.

Speaker 2 And then we had to go through and look at every single one to make sure that it was in scope of the project. And so we got a whole giant room full of friends together and they helped.

Speaker 2 And we spent a week curating photos saying, like, yep, this is in scope. Nope, this is a picture of a buffalo and it's really cute, but that is not a sign.

Speaker 3 Wait, I want the buffalo picture project next, please.

Speaker 4 there were bloopers for a different group yeah

Speaker 2 it was honestly so much fun like

Speaker 2 so inspiring to see all of these amazing pictures that people went out and took and they're like the

Speaker 2 thousands of people contributed all of these photos it was just so cool and also i learned so much looking at all of the different signs like you get distracted you're supposed to be checking like is there no people in this picture is it a sign

Speaker 2 wait a minute this is really cool Oops, now I'm reading the sign.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 but we got through them. We got through all of them in about a week.
And then it took another week to somehow get those into a publicly viewable website, which thank goodness, it finally worked.

Speaker 2 It was a little bit of a

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Speaker 2 A challenge, but... We've got really amazing people on the team and helping.
And so just all kinds of people putting effort into it. It was really, really great.

Speaker 3 So cool. Yeah, the site looks amazing.
It looks really good. I love the design of it.
It just is very

Speaker 3 fun.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, go check it out. If you haven't,

Speaker 3 do you have the URL offhand?

Speaker 2 If you go to saveoursigns.org, there's kind of three big buttons. And so there's view the collection and then add your photos and then look at where we still need photos.

Speaker 2 So that's probably the fastest route to find it is to go to saveoursigns.org and then click on view the photos.

Speaker 3 Perfect. Yeah.
And add your photos.

Speaker 3 I've been to a couple of parks this summer and I've been slipping. I need to make up my archive quota.

Speaker 3 Just to kind of

Speaker 3 to close this out here, I would love to hear.

Speaker 3 what each of you see as not just like the future of archiving or like the near future because who knows how anything is going, you know, like we can only look so far into the future.

Speaker 3 But what do you see as like the immediate kind of need of archiving? And why is this work important? Because

Speaker 3 it is

Speaker 3 thankless work in a lot of ways. So, but it is so vital to remembering our history and keeping our history alive.

Speaker 3 So, I would just love to hear just why you think this is worth doing, getting involved in, all that good stuff.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 I guess I get a lot of hope and joy out of all of the comments that we get from people and

Speaker 2 just hearing that people appreciate the opportunity to help in some way, even if it's small.

Speaker 2 I mean, in the grand scheme of things, is it the biggest deal in the world to keep track of some signs and some parts? You know, maybe not, but this is how we're telling our story.

Speaker 2 This is one piece of the big puzzle of everything.

Speaker 2 And we want to do what we can to preserve it. And it's been so

Speaker 2 special to hear from people saying, like, I am so happy that I've been able to submit photos and be a part of this work, be a part of the project.

Speaker 2 I think it...

Speaker 2 it just it's helping to bring people together it's helping to raise awareness and and getting people um involved in just the conversation of what do we want our history to be and what do we want to learn about for the future.

Speaker 2 So things are really scary and stressful a lot of the time, but I just feel a lot of joy and hope when I think about all those people that are helping.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I definitely want to echo that.

Speaker 4 For Data Rescue Project, it's really recognizing, building awareness of the importance of public data and

Speaker 4 why it matters and how much it infuses our life.

Speaker 4 And I think for us, this is the only one campaign that we're involved in, but it's one that is so important for our national history, just as much as the public data that we support outside of that.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 being able to continue to tell our stories and

Speaker 4 tell the stories of all the nation, of all the peoples who are in our nation, I think is what I get most out of this.

Speaker 4 And to echo Jenny,

Speaker 4 hearing people talk about how much this has helped them get through some difficult times, I think it also has

Speaker 4 meant a lot and it's given me hope for how we can fill the gaps in for this nine months and next three years that we have left.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we write about a lot of,

Speaker 3 to put it mildly, concerning things

Speaker 3 that are happening in the news.

Speaker 3 Bummer news is a lot of the beat that we're on because a lot of tech is going that way. So it is really nice to see something that people can get involved in.
And it is, it's an optimistic project.

Speaker 3 Even though it's inspired by

Speaker 3 like a bummer of an executive order, I think it means a lot to people to be able to get involved directly in something like this. It's very like tangible

Speaker 3 that they can see directly, like, this is, I helped do this.

Speaker 3 So, thank you both so much for your work. I'm going to link to the project and to

Speaker 3 a data rescue project as well

Speaker 3 in the show notes. But

Speaker 3 thank you so much. This has been

Speaker 3 fantastic.

Speaker 4 Thank you for having us.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 4 And all the support for media. It's been really great.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We can't write about this stuff without people like you doing it.

Speaker 3 As a reminder, 404 Media is journalists founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 44media.co.

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